H.P. Lovecraft's Philosophy of Horror (2014)

Article focuses too much on Cthulhu, not enough on Lovecraft's other interests -- his early and enduring fascination with poetics (he seems to have been a bit of a 19th century hipster, permanently disgruntled about being born a century too late to be Edgar Allen Poe) and with astronomy (during his lifetime the scale of the cosmos expanded shockingly with the use of photographic plates for astronomical observations, the development of spectrophotometry, and the discovery of other galaxies and then the red shift and the Hubble constant) -- indeed, the universe increased during his life in both volume, contents, and age by about the same extent that Moore's Law has impacted computing performance over the past 40 years.

Still a hugely influential writer in SF/horror, despite his highly regrettable (read: bigoted) and misanthropic outlook. I attribute his enduring relevance to his fiction providing the opposite of a science fictional sense of wonder: he brought a sense of cosmic dread at our insignificance in the face of an uncaring universe front and center, and in the post-nuclear age this resonates loudly.

It's interesting to witness Lovecraft's work rise from being considered obscure, poorly written schlock to mainstream greatness. Much the same happened with Philip K Dick. It took many decades, but their work is now part of the canon. It always makes me wonder what other great, underappreciated writers are out there right now, who we might not learn about for another fifty years.

Lovecraft is as anthropocentric as any author because he is writing for a human audience, and his characters are all human. His concern was less about an unrelenting materialism and more about the human reaction to unrelenting materialism. Otherwise he would have written essays about it rather than stories.

Interesting read, though. I had no idea Lovecraft wasn't well-known in his time. Certainly he'd have been pleased, I think, to have known of his future fame.